put it in, if provoked ... shall.  Then you will not use the shower-bath again—­you promise?  I dare say Mr. Kenyon observed yesterday how unwell you were looking—­tell me if he didn’t!  Now do not work, dearest!  Do not think of Chiappino, leave him behind ... he has a good strong life of his own, and can wait for you.  Oh—­but let me remember to say of him, that he and the other personages appear to me to articulate with perfect distinctness and clearness ... you need not be afraid of having been obscure in this first part.  It is all as lucid as noon.

Shall I go down-stairs to-day?  ‘No’ say the privy-councillors, ‘because it is cold,’ but I shall go peradventure, because the sun brightens and brightens, and the wind has gone round to the west.

George had come home yesterday before you left me, but the stars were favourable to us and kept him out of this room.  Now he is at Worcester—­went this morning, on those never ending ‘rounds,’ poor fellow, which weary him I am sure.

And why should music and the philosophy of it make you ‘melancholy,’ ever dearest, more than the other arts, which each has the seal of the age, modifying itself after a fashion and to one?  Because it changes more, perhaps.  Yet all the Arts are mediators between the soul and the Infinite, ... shifting always like a mist, between the Breath on this side, and the Light on that side ... shifted and coloured; mediators, messengers, projected from the Soul, to go and feel, for Her, out there!

You don’t call me ‘kind’ I confess—­but then you call me ‘too kind’ which is nearly as bad, you must allow on your part.  Only you were not in earnest when you said that, as it appeared afterward. Were you, yesterday, in pretending to think that I owed you nothing ... I?

May God bless you.  He knows that to give myself to you, is not to pay you.  Such debts are not so paid.

Yet I am your

BA.

People’s Journal for March 7th.

R.B. to E.B.B.

Tuesday Morning.
[Post-mark, March 10, 1846.]

Dear, dear Ba, if you were here I should not much speak to you, not at first—­nor, indeed, at last,—­but as it is, sitting alone, only words can be spoken, or (worse) written, and, oh how different to look into the eyes and imagine what might be said, what ought to be said, though it never can be—­and to sit and say and write, and only imagine who looks above me, looks down, understanding and pardoning all!  My love, my Ba, the fault you found once with some expressions of mine about the amount of imperishable pleasures already hoarded in my mind, the indestructible memories of you; that fault, which I refused to acquiesce under the imputation of, at first, you remember—­well, what a fault it was, by this better light!  If all stopped here and now; horrible! complete oblivion were the thing to be prayed for, rather!  As it